'Lost in the Stars'

Money was tight in the late nineties and I picked up freelance writing and editing work wherever I could find it. I wrote feature stories for a hospital magazine and a New York State nature journal. An English professor I knew had written an opera libretto based on Columbus’ voyages to the New World and I edited it. Another professor, who taught psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., was fulfilling every academic’s dream by writing a memoir. Frank Calabria published Let It Be a Dance: My Life Story in 2001 after three rounds of editing. 

By avocation, Frank was a dancer. In 1993 he published Dance of the Sleepwalkers: The Dance Marathon Fad. He met his wife while working as an instructor for a dance studio in Brooklyn, which explains the title of his memoir. He was born in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in an Italian neighborhood. Among his neighbors was Tony Bennett, who died Friday at age ninety-six. Bennett was particularly close to Frank’s younger brother, Ernie Calabria, who worked as Harry Belafonte’s guitarist for nine years and recorded fourteen albums with him. He also played with Pablo Casals. Frank writes in his memoir:

 

“On one occasion, Tony Bennett called on his way to the Guggenheim Museum of Art—Bennett is a serious and talented painter. He invited Ernie and me to come along. As we drove in his white limousine, I felt like royalty. From the moment Bennett stepped out of the car, he was greeted by well-wishers. It took him a quarter of an hour to get from the street curb to the entrance of the museum.”

 

Bennett gave Frank and Ernie’s mother one of his still-life paintings. Frank describes the time Bennett came to the Calabria house in Queens and rang the bell:

 

“After a time, on the landing above, my grandfather appeared bowing his violin; the sound of the instrument had an eerie quality. Bennett called up, ‘Is Ernie home?’ In response my grandfather peered down at the caller for a long, long while. Then, without any sign of acknowledgment, he slowly turned around and disappeared from the landing, bowing the violin as he went. My grandfather’s ghostly performance left Bennett shaken as he left the house.”

 

In 1994, Ernie died of a heart attack at age sixty-six and Bennett spoke at his memorial service in Manhattan, relating the grandfather story. He sang Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars,” and Bennett’s painting of Ernie was displayed in the chapel. “The portrait is half in darkness,” Frank writes, “and half in light. My brother was in contact with both worlds.”

 

Two things about Bennett's singing appeal to me: the sense of intimacy he establishes with listeners, as though he were singing to one person at a time, as in conversation; and -- a related quality -- the expressive attention he pays to lyrics. Whitney Balliett in his profile of Bennett, “A Quality That Lets You In” (Alec Wilder and His Friends, 1974), listens as the singer tells him a story:

 

“‘I like the funny things in this life that could only happen to me now. Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head, and every­one was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said “Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?” and hung up.’”